Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions provide tools and capabilities needed to create and maintain a clear picture of customers, from first contact through purchase and post-sales. For complex organizations, a CRM system may provide features and capabilities to help improve the way sales and marketing organizations target new customers, manage marketing campaigns, and drive sales activities. CRM systems may include many components, hardware and software, utilized individually or in a shared manner by users internal or external to the organization.
CRM systems are an example of computing systems where data associated with entities such as persons, organizations, accounts, and similar ones are maintained for various purposes. Some of the information, like contact information, collected and maintained by CRM applications may also be collected by other common applications such as email, contact, and/or scheduling applications (for example, Outlook® by Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash.). While other applications have object based or comparable structures for contacts and similar data, CRM applications typically employ hierarchical data structures, where the data is associated with accounts. Thus, conventional approaches to importing contact data to CRM applications include a significant amount of manual operations that involve importing different types of data such as communication history along with contact data, creation of hierarchies, connections with accounts, and so on.